Working with Multiple Calendars, Vacation Days, and Weekend working days

Sean Tanya

In my project team, we have team members located in different parts of the globe. I need to link to the project non-US calendars and holidays aside from those of the US. Additionally, I need to enter the vacation days of all team members who has vacation plans or out days, and enter weekend working days when, say, a deployment team will upgrade a system during a maintenance period over the weekend. I could not find HELP information on this topic.

Ted Cochran

While there's no specific way to do this in the resource settings, there are some creative ways to get around this.

 

One great way to handle this is to create sheets that contain nothing but the holidays or out-of-office dates for team members.  You can either have a team member maintain their own "black-out" sheets (simple list of tasks, dates, assigned to me, then set as resource management), or maintain one for the team.  Remember each resource would need to be assigned to the task, and tasks can only have one assignment, so you'd duplicate the holiday for each person.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Ted

Stephanie Taylor

Each person could create their own smartsheet calendar to maintain and then all of the calenders can be published to Outlook (SS just annouced the new Outlook calendar app - here is the link - https://community.smartsheet.com/announcement/smartsheet-outlook-here) or Google calendar.  All calendars would be merged into one calendar for easy viewing and maintainance (you can make updates from either Outlook, Google and SS will automatically update as well and vice versa).

Sean Tanya

I'll try that. Thanks Ted.

Sean Tanya

Thanks Stephanie. I am guessing you have tried that. So would merging make SmartSheet automatically detect that a task will take longer to finish since said task overlaps with the resource's vacation day(s) or is merging just a view of two calendars?

Victoria Rollins

I had a similar question - trying to figure out how incorporate other non-working days. We use the vacation calendar, and it works for resource allocation. However, every project sheet then needs to have all those same days manually added again, which is extremely repetitive and frustrating. Bulk-adding holidays by country to each sheet would be a slightly simpler step, but being able to add holidays for each of our main countries at the enterprise level would be extremely helpful if the user's profile tied them to a location. 

Travis

 

Victoria - SysAdmins on Team and Enterprise accounts can create organizational-level working days which are applied to all new sheets created. Here’s information about this functionality: http://help.smartsheet.com/customer/portal/articles/516392-designating-non-working-holidays-on-project-sheets#organization

Robert Kalkstein

If there is no feature that allows multiple calendars, I would like to vote to add that feature.

 

We have a development team in India and one in the Middle East. They each have different working days (Mon-Fri and Sun-Thurs) and they each have different holidays.

We would like the ability, as Admin, to create Working Day calendars for each team, and be able to assign a calendar to a User Account or Group.

Travis

Thanks for the input, Robert! I will pass your suggestion along! 

Roland Horwood

Hi,

 

multiple calendars, assigned by resource - it has my vote,

 

Roland

Geoff Casey

Resource level working days would be a great feature.  We do business with vendors in Asia and have lines in our calendar that represent production at the factory.  These factories shut down during Chinese New Year and it would be great to not have to manually add the two weeks to the schedule as the production duration would be misleading to other users view the sheet.

lynn.williams83681

I also have a similar situation to Robert above, but with added complications.  The project I'm working on have UK based consultants who are traveling and working in both Mon - Fri and Sun - Thur environments.

At sheet level I can set different working weeks, but at a more global overview this is causing issues.  One suggestion has been to set a 7 day working week, however this only works for tasks which do not over run that 5 day week, and even then it is fiddly and prone to errors unless I don't use dependencies and ensure all entries are manually controlled.

Does anyone have any suggestions please - all ideas very welcome

Thanks